Your Rights End…Where My Feelings Begin
You never can tell what nuggets you might stumble upon when googling, especially with the unintentional aid of auto complete. In the midst of a mostly unrelated search last week, I stumbled upon an image that at first seemed amusing, then intriguing, and then got me to thinking through the profound truth about the left it contained in its seven words.
Your rights end where my feelings begin.
Your exercise of free speech on campus supporting the pro-life movement offends me. Your opposition to gay marriage makes me feel you are homophobic. Your refusal to support Obamacare makes me feel you are insensitive to the poor.
Or this one: your (legally purchased) gun makes me feel nervous. Leave it to my barber, that font of common sense, to put this whole idea in perspective when we discussed this impending column, with his retort, “well, my being unarmed around you makes me feel nervous.”
If the right was as consumed by feelings as the ideologically bankrupt left, they could easily counter, and often have, with their own well-developed set of feelings. Your pro-abortion stance makes me feel you hate babies. Your pro-Obamacare position makes me feel you don’t respect my right to control my own health care. Your support of higher taxes makes me feel you are stealing my money.
The obvious commonality to those sentiments, the word “feel” and its many iterations, is what seems to be driving policy these days. Damn history, damn the facts, let’s go with our feelings.
Feelings are obviously a part of the human experience we all have to process every moment of every day. But it is when we assume the stance of feelings über alles and those feelings are deemed to be actionable that we delve deeply into the danger zone. Whether or not you agree with the biblical assertion that the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick, we can nevertheless stipulate that the founders had a keen enough understanding of human nature, and the need to account for it, that they wrote a supreme law of the land designed for the exact purpose of nullifying emotion to the greatest extent possible as a principle of good governance. If men were angels….
Certainly, whipping up the impressionable emotions of voters has been part and parcel of American political history. And the Republican party in general and conservatives in particular, though hardly immune from the lure of emotional appeal, has constantly fought a losing battle on this front. It is hard to counter the emotional appeal of hope and change with smaller government and less goodies. Promoting less is inevitably trumped by promising more.
The powerful allure of appealing to feelings is ridiculously easy, especially when fueled by a compliant media. They will report on any wacky story as if it is mainstream from groups they dislike, which leads to the inevitable denigration of the group itself. These are fairly easy to spot once the formula is known – the headlines generally read “Republican Legislator” followed by the silliness said or proposed by some obscure town councilman. But when Democrats offer the same inanity – the story will report the same, but party affiliation will either be unmentioned in the headline, buried deep in the story or absent altogether. Since so many people just read headlines, you can imagine the results.
No more clear a case be made than with Israel. There is scant debate about just war theory, genuine discussions about occupation, or U.N. Security Resolution 181. From the top down, the discussion is all about ending violence through the lens of Israel as the sole, or at least primary, brutal actor. All the media need do is draw the inevitable moral equivalence between the democrats of Israel and the savages of Hamas, and the battle is won, and the path cleared for transmitting constant images of dead Arab children. Little attention is paid to the stark truth in Benjamin Netanyahu’s observation that Israel uses missiles to protect its citizens, while Hamas uses citizens to protect its missiles.
Why do progressives reflexively grant Hamas equal status as bargainers for peace as they do Israel, while constitutionalists do not? Alan Johnson, British Labor Party politician, and former Home Secretary certainly gets it. In his complaint about BBC reporter Jon Snow tweeting photos of dead Syrian children and making them out to be dead Gazans, Johnson said, “The underlying problem is that Snow, like many Western liberals, tends to treat pathological movements with no negotiable grievance as if they are rational political movements with grievances that can be negotiated.” Well stated.
How can leftists so out of their mind with political sensitivity that it seriously debates “trigger warnings” for essays and talks that may merely mention violence, be comfortable with the toxic anti-semitism at “pro-Palestine” rallies? All this in service of a ruling group who compel “the wearing of the hijab alongside other measures, including insisting women stay at home and be segregated from men, and the promotion of polygamy.” Sounds really liberal, right?
It seems the mere fact that Hamas is not only not Christian, but actively committed to the destruction of Christianity and Judaism, is more than enough for the left to carry their water. But it also perfectly demonstrates how irrational and perverted our feelings can become. Think about it: the left supporting people who, to put it kindly, are defined by their relegation of women to second class status, murderous anti-semitism and absolute intolerance of homosexuals, among many other prehistoric notions. You can’t make this stuff up.
We’re not talking about a collection of misfits from the internet fringe, but mainstream thinkers, and of course the celebrities, the useful idiots who would see Hamas triumph over the ruins of Israel. One does wish for just a moment that Gloria Steinem would be forced to live in Gaza for a week and see what she thinks. But she doesn’t think about it, she feels about it. Feels that Israel should stop.
The faux debate about impeaching President Obama is another instant classic. Though the GOP has no intention of pursuing impeachment, the left believes that by pretending they do, they can whip up antipathy to Republicans (not to mention gobs of money) among gullible and low information voters who are vulnerable to the scripted argument that Republicans are so mean and racist that they want to take down our first black president.
And how about our southern border, where it has been way too easy for the left/media to advance an immigration argument based on feelings, as we are bombarded by images of suffering central American children. That can hardly compete with the argument about rule of law and border security among the many Americans not paying attention.
The left’s lies about impeachment, emotion-inducing reports from the border and grant of de facto moral equivalence to a despicable band of Islamo fascists in their siege of Israel are but the latest iterations of governance by feelings. And the problem is not so much that leftists in need of changing the subject from their unbroken string of failures constantly try this, but that they succeed more often than they fail.
